Twitter is a great place where you can follow what happens in the PHP community. A good selection in your list helps you keep the noise level low and gives you the opportunity to closely communicate with the VIPs of the PHP community.
Here are ten vocal PHPers to include in your list if you want to know more about PHP development and be promptly updated on breaking news by their original sources, in no specific order:
- Rasmus Lerdorf (@rasmus): Danish programmer mostly famous for having created the PHP language in 1995. He's still the leader of the development of PHP 5 and PHP 6 as a Benevolent Dictator For Life.
- Terry Chay (@tychay): the “PHP Terrorist,” and the greatest advocate of PHP over Ruby. Worked on Tagged and now at Automattic, the company that created Wordpress. He knows how to scale PHP applications.
- Andi Gutmans (@andigutmans): co-founder of Zend Technologies, the largest company behind PHP development. Ever heard of them? The nd in Zend comes from Andi's first name.
- Derick Rethans (@derickr): developer of PHP core and of the very handy Xdebug extension. He will likely be the next PHP release manager.
- Matthew Weier O'Phinney (@weierophinney): lead developer of Zend Framework, the PHP framework from the company that made PHP what it is now.
- Fabien Potencier (@fabpot): lead developer of Symfony and CEO of SensioLabs, were both Symfony and Doctrine were born. Symfony is along with Zend Framework one of the largest open source PHP frameworks, while Doctrine is an object-relational mapper.
- Sebastian Bergmann (@s_bergmann): creator of PHPUnit, the testing framework for PHP applications that became a standard as the xUnit incarnation for this platform.
- D. Keith Casey, Jr. (@CaseySoftware): founder of CaseySoftware; PHP and web2Project developer, organizer of the TEK·X conference.
- Cal Evans (@CalEvans): worked at Zend and IBuildings, major PHP companies. Former host and face of ZendCon. An icon of the PHP community.
- Marco Tabini (@mtabini): creator of php|architect and of the Blue Parabola consulting company; one of the most respected voices in the PHP landscape.
